On October 5, The New York Timesdetailed the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s alleged decades-long campaign of buying sexual harassment victims’ silence through nondisclosure agreements and confidential, out-of-court settlements. These secret deals, according to the Times’ reporting, buried stories of abuse, extending from Weinstein’s alleged harassment of young assistants, temps, employees and executives at the Weinstein Company and Miramax to allegedly assaulting actresses who appeared in films he produced or distributed.

There is no question that labor and employment law (not to mention criminal law) forbid sexual harassment and assault at work. But the law also plays an important role in protecting workers’ right to speak out about harassment.

For example, under the National Labor Relations Act, employers are not allowed to prevent workers from talking about sexual harassment or even gender-inequity complaints at work or when they relate to work. The same is true for non-disparagement provisions in employment contracts: It’s an unfair labor practice to have employees agree not to “publicly criticize, ridicule, disparage or defame” a company or its “directors, officers, shareholders, or employees.” So while these provisions still persist in boilerplate form in most employment contracts, they can violate federal labor law if put to use.

Moreover, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the federal law that protects employees from sexual harassment and sex discrimination at work, invalidates settlement agreements that prohibit settling employees from filing charges with or assisting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in its investigation of any sexual-harassment charges. Because the EEOC acts not only on behalf of private parties but also “to vindicate the public interest” in preventing employment discrimination, such settlement terms would impede the enforcement of Title VII. As one court explains: “In many cases of widespread discrimination, victims suffer in silence. In such instances, a sprinkling of settlement agreements that contain stipulations prohibiting cooperation with the EEOC could effectively thwart an agency investigation.”

There are still obstacles to securing these rights, of course. When employers censor, threaten, and retaliate against employees that publicize abuse or take collective action to fight harassment, they often do so with impunity. For a range of reasons—including the dramatic decline in union membership in the private sector—this realm of labor and employment law is generally underenforced, meaning the task of enforcement often de facto falls to companies’ human-resources departments. But internal compliance structures are notoriously weak: As is alleged to have happened at the Weinstein Company, those who enforce anti-harassment protections can even be complicit with the harassers. Workers whose employers outsource their HR departments—something that’s increasingly common—are no doubt less likely to share sensitive allegations that could end their careers.

Confounding the problems of underenforcement is a network of legal rules that act at cross-purposes with laws encouraging transparency. These include rules governing how to interpret confidentiality requirements—specifically, those in non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), out-of-court settlements, and arbitration provisions—that can limit what employees are allowed to say about sexual harassment. (While Weinstein reportedly deployed NDAs and settlements to silence alleged victims or prevent supervising employees from speaking about reported misconduct, other employers—like Fox News, in response to claims made by Gretchen Carlson, and Sterling Jewelers, to name a couple recent high-profile stories—have reportedly invoked arbitration provisions requiring confidential adjudication of harassment claims.)

The first of these approaches is NDAs, which employers regularly include in employment agreements. While NDAs are unenforceable when used to silence workers’ discussion of sexual harassment at work and in legal claims, they can and are enforced to silence employees’ public speech. Employers originally used NDAs to secure control over employees’ knowledge of trade secrets. At the end of the 19th century, courts expanded the scope of what NDAs could cover from only the most highly confidential pieces of information to a “general prohibition on using a wide range of firm-specific information” and to publicly disclosing information about employer misconduct, short of actions that were illegal. State courts now generally enforce these provisions if they’re deemed “reasonable,” but they can be struck down as unenforceable if an employee’s interest outweighs an employer’s or they’re found to go against public policy, such as when they would prevent enforcement of state criminal law.

But it’s not as clear whether confidentiality agreements could be enforced when sexual harassment is at issue. Manycourts apply balancing tests to determine whether employees can provide evidence in open court against, for example, sexual harassers when doing so would otherwise violate confidentiality agreements with employers. Without the benefit of legal counsel, and when, as may turn out to be the case with some of the Weinstein allegations, sexual harassment does not rise to the level of criminal sexual assault, workers are right to be uncertain about what NDAs prohibit. That, along with the accompanying risk of getting fired, can discourage employees from speaking up.

Out-of-court settlements represent a second obstacle to transparency. In the vast majority of cases, settlement agreements resolving sexual harassment claims in exchange for monetary payments require that victims not speak publicly about the settlement’s terms or any details of the circumstances giving rise to the litigation. If, for example, women who have signed such agreements with Weinstein publicly disclose information covered by those agreements’ confidentiality provisions, they face a substantial risk of being sued for breaching them. Such a breach could cost them millions. (Some lawyers and legal experts have started questioning whether drafting such settlement provisions is ethical when they concern conduct such as sexual harassment, because it may constitute “conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice.” But there’s currently no legal sanction on lawyers for doing so.) Further, while the EEOC can strike down confidentiality provisions that restrict employees’ compliance with its investigations, there is no enforcement authority that, in the absence of a criminal case, can do so for agreements a firm or executive reaches with non-employees.

Given all this, workers who want to disclose confidential information protected by settlement agreements end up with limited options. However, if an alleged harasser publicly discloses or makes denials about the same information, then under confidentiality agreements that are mutually binding on both parties, the harasser could be sued for breach of contract and prevented from being able to in turn sue victims for the same. Herman Cain, for example, made himself vulnerable to a lawsuit when, during his presidential run in 2011, he derided women who went public with their sexual-harassment claims against him, rejected their allegations as false, and denied settlement amounts reached in litigation they brought. Further, when, as in the Weinstein case, the story is so explosive, suing alleged victims for a breach of confidentiality may be too costly in public-relations terms.

And third, most employment contracts contain arbitration provisions that move lawsuits from a public forum to a private, usually confidential, proceeding. The Supreme Court is currently considering whether such provisions violate federal law when they prevent employees from collectively pursuing claims, but the Court’s recent rulings in favor of arbitration suggest that they will likely survive legal challenge even under those circumstances. Still, some arbitration provisions only apply to claims against employers, not claims against individual executives. This means employees can sometimes bypass arbitration provisions and file sexual-harassment suits in court that would be subject to public scrutiny (though these are usually followed by quick resolutions through settlement, as in Carlson’s case against Fox’s Roger Ailes).

These features of employment contracts are emblematic of a broader erosion of employees’ right to control information at work, including information aboutpay. Compounding this, the rise of the gig economy and the prevalence of outsourcing and subcontracting has not only exempted countless workers from legal protections but has also ruptured the solidarity and cohesion that makes it easier for workers to share information about workplace abuses. (The allegations of Emily Nestor, a temporary employee at the Weinstein Company, provide a case in point.)

So what can be done to better protect employees? Only systemic fixes could limit serial harassers’ currently broad impunity. Ensuring that workers are aware of their right to share information is a first step. But government agencies like the EEOC would need more resources to investigate and sue employers responsible for both sexual harassment and retaliations against employees for speaking out. In addition, it’d be important to expand legal protections for people hired as gig workers or subcontractors. Finally, state courts and legislatures could narrow the application of NDA provisions and make defenses for their breach more readily available in sexual-harassment cases. They could also render unenforceable boilerplate language, lurking in so many contracts today, that automatically relegates resolution of sexual harassment claims to private arbiters.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

In analyzing Doug Jones’s surprise win, the pundit-in-chief misconstrues the race and elides his own role in Moore’s defeat.

Doug Jones’s victory in the U.S. Senate race in Alabama on Tuesday poses a quandary to Republicans at all levels—but to none more than President Trump. The results of the race demonstrate the limitations of both his political power and of his self-appointed role as pundit-in-chief. He is more interested in being right than in winning—but on Tuesday, he did neither.

The president offered a series of somewhat contradictory responses to the race between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. Late Tuesday, he tweeted:

Congratulations to Doug Jones on a hard fought victory. The write-in votes played a very big factor, but a win is a win. The people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time. It never ends!

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.